The Judge of Ages
And the insect-shaped mechanism drew out canisters and threw them left, right, and within the central fountain, where they hissed and emitted growing clouds of filmy gray gas that darkened to an inky black as it thickened.
Zouave Zhigansk was near the statue of Michael the Archangel. He was not as heavily modified as a true Hormagaunt, but his nostrils could pinch shut like those of a sea lion, and he had some immunity to the soporific. He stayed within the gas cloud, daring the dog things to shoot at him, and whenever a bold bulldog or thin-faced whippet ventured too close, Zouave either sprayed something from hidden scent glands that made the dog recoil, yowling, or Zouave flung a porcupine quill into a muzzle with surprising accuracy.
Zouave had, one in either hand, antiques recovered from the broken weapon cases. The first one he now fired, but the shot went high, and the payload exploded into lesser payloads in midair, riddling the stalactite-shaped chandeliers without effect.
The second weapon was a silver club that shot a hypodermic needle, which failed to affect the dog thing physiology. The dog, a Saint Bernard badly in need of a trim, merely yowled at the sting. In frustration Zouave threw the silver club with great force toward the Saint Bernard, who was struck in the nose and was blinded when the propellant liquid chamber broke and splashed chemical in its eyes.
The blinded beast dropped its musket. Growing bolder, as well as growing low on breath, Zouave emerged from the black cloud, and snatched up that musket. Finding it empty, he ran at the nearest Blue Man, the handyman named Unwing.
Bedel Unwing, unfortunately, was paying no attention. He was carefully directing pistol-fire at the balcony at the far side of the great chamber, the tip of his tongue sticking from the corner of his mouth in concentration. This was the first opportunity Unwing had been given to join the higher-status members of his order in a significant venture, and his hope had been to better himself in their eyes, so he was obeying all instructions carefully. No one had instructed him to watch his back.
Zouave ran him through, and the little man screamed in shock, outrage, and surprise; his scream became a gargle of blood, and then a death rattle.
Even as he did the deed, Zouave was struck from behind by the blind and maddened Saint Bernard, who did not need eyes to find and tear out Zouave’s throat. The dog died at that same time, overcome by the number and toxicity of the spines Zouave left in its muzzle, skull, paws, and neck. The three corpses lay piled atop each other.
The three Donors, Toil, Drudge, and Drench, succumbed to the vapor, and lay in a heap near him, trembling and holding their heads.
Prissy Pskov was on the other side of the chamber near the stand of powered armor, beneath the statue of Hades. Her weapon was a handheld flamer, and she sprayed fire right and left, while dog things screamed and fled out of range, perhaps due to their instinctive fear of fire, perhaps due to the smoke and the overpowering odor of petrol and magnesium. She did not really want to hurt the dogs, recognizing the craftsmanship which had gone into creating them, so she tended to aim too low, striking the golden floor before her feet, and driving the dogs back rather than lighting them afire.
Prissy was astonished at her easy victory up until the moment when a gas canister landed at her feet. Not a thing from her era, she did not recognize it, and did not realize it was a threat, until she leaned over it, and was overcome by the first gush as it erupted. She sniffed curiously at the odd scent. Down she fell, but the barbs in her hair continued to move and sway, and puddles of fire burned to her left and right, and no one approached her.
Even though the dog things stayed well away from the black cloud, which was visible, an influence continued to spread from the fallen Prissy Pskov, which was not visible. The dogs in a moment had broken out in rashes and scabs, had fur falling in patches, and soon were running in circles, biting themselves and each other, howling madly. More than a score of dogs were affected by this in under a minute, and all fled away from that quarter of the chamber.
5. Warlock
At about this time, one of the dog things with a sharp nose, scenting something, poked with a pike between the wheels of the smaller sky-blue coffin, probing the undercarriage, and was rewarded with an exclamation of rage. Out from beneath the blue coffin came Mickey of Williamsburg, hands held high.
The triplets, Preceptors Ydmoy, Yndelf, and Yndech, left off firing their pistols at the balcony, and overcome with curiosity, turned to examine the rotund Witch-man. Their coat gems flickered briefly as they probed and communed.
Yndelf said, “Tune your pistols to the radio frequency of our mites; despite the radioactivity, we shall drive the signal through the interference and activate the paralytic mites in his nervous system.”
Three thin rays of laser energy, blindingly white, with invisible beams of radio frequencies heterodyned on them, flickered across the imposing form of the rotund Witch. He laughed, kicking his knees high in a jig, thumbs in the earpieces of his hat, then turned his back toward the Blue Men, bowing and slapping his wobbling buttocks cheeks with either palm.
Yndech said, “I think I have deduced the rudiments of the expressive and posture-related nonverbal cues of these antique pre-Locust creatures. I interpret this to be a gesture of disrespect.”
“The relict seems to be of normal human biology and neural pattern,” said Ydmoy in a contemplative tone. “How was he not affected by the paralytic mites?”
Mickey could not understand the language, but he laughed nonetheless, and said something in Virginian. “Do you think I am fool enough to eat fairy food? Mortals never return from the Land Beyond once they taste of those unearthly viands! No, I merely rubbed the beans and rice you offered on my teeth, and spit all out after. You think I cannot fast for a week with all this stored blubber? Ah! But watch this trick I learned from Brother Hare!”
And he flinched in terror at the sight of the Clade-dwellers at two opposite sides of the chamber succumbing to black gas, and he began backing away.
Ydmoy said to Yndech, “It would be enlightening if you would again share your knowledge of the gesture significations of the pre-Locust relict.”
Yndech exclaimed, “Aha! Again I can interpret the nonverbal signs! The Relict Melechemoshemyazanagual Onmyoji de Concepcion is frightened of the pacification gas! Notice how he moves away from it, and at the same time opens wide his mouth and both eyes, crossing his forearms before his face. He bangs his knees together. The gesture is unambiguous!”
Ydmoy nodded gravely. “Impressive! You command an adroit body of learning.”
But Yndelf said, “Inconclusive. Possibility exists that he gesticulates in such a fashion for some other purpose.”
Ydmoy said, “Small possibility! Let us test!” and he signaled for the nearest automaton to throw a canister at Mickey. The nearest dog thing, seeing the automaton throw, dropped its musket, went to all fours, and sprinted away.
The canister landed and the cloud spread, and now Mickey merely laughed, shouting in his own language, “I ingest larger doses of the holy drug than this for recreation, or to clear my sinuses! Your magic is weaker than mine, Blue Men!”
“The Followers cannot enter the gas cloud,” said Yndelf thoughtfully. “And the cloud interferes with the penetration power of our laser-based handweapons.”
Ydmoy, nodding, commanded two of the automata forth. The metal figures, in perfect lockstep, clanked into the cloud, striding with menacing purpose.
All three Blue Men flinched at the deafening noise of metal breaking, and stared when one of the automata came hopping backward on one leg, its hip motors whirling the shattered struts of its other leg. In the same moment, the sky-blue coffin came roaring out of the cloud, machine guns blazing, and ran over the wounded automaton. Such was the speed and the forward momentum of the coffin that it struck the falling automaton as if striking a ramp, and sailed wildly into the air, shooting vents of jellied gasoline left and right, while the loudspeakers amplified the yodels and whoops of Mickey the Witch.
T
he three Blue Men commanded dogs and automata against the raging coffin, and retreated across the chamber toward the statue of Father Time, at whose feet the deadliest fight in the chamber was even then waxing hot.
The ceiling guns and wall cannons twitched, but did not open fire on a coffin their records showed was rightfully stored in the chamber, and authorized to use deadly force against intruders. Unimpeded, chanting his battle-spells through the coffin loudspeakers, the Warlock of Williamsburg drove his enemies before him, moving toward the central fountain.
Mickey was certain the magic was strong within him that hour.
6. Nymphs
When the Nymphs were first overcome by the cloud, Oenoe, and Aea and Thysa, seeing that it was a suppressant of the higher brain functions only, put themselves into a hypnogogic state, akin to that of a sleepwalker, and activated similar neural complexes woven for generations into the cortexes of their people. Walking as if in a dream, and playing their musical instruments slowly, the unconscious and semiunconscious Nymphs rose and walked in procession up the curving stairway behind the statue of Michael the Archangel.
Only Omester the Satyr was from so early a period in history that he had no such control complex in his hindbrain, and so Sir Guiden had to fling him over his shoulders fireman-style, and lead the way upstairs to the balcony.
They all emerged from the black cloud. The gas was heavier than air, so it sank rather than rose.
Oenoe, Aea, and Thysa soon formulated a philter from their mantillas to counteract the effect. Sir Guiden charged Oenoe strictly to stay here out of the line of fire, and she bowed her head in obedience to him. “We are not a warlike people, my lord husband,” she said, smiling.
And so she and her maidens commanded the unconscious ones around them play music on their pipes and harps, with sleeping lips and fingers, and she waited for them to wake.
The mantillas the Nymph ladies wore spread and flapped in time with the music, and they were spreading a cloud of perfume to lull and bedevil any dog things venturing toward that quarter of the chamber.
Thysa wandered away down the balcony, until she was directly over the alcove holding the Witchfolk. Smiling and looking down from above, she applauded their brave deeds, and threw flowers at the feet of any fighter she thought needed a moment of berserk rage to aid him in his struggle: the flowers released spores to trigger battle-frenzy.
7. Witches
There was a safety feature built into the storage vats for the dangerous medical nanomaterial fluids stored in the throne room. It was a technology from some era neither the Blues nor the Witches knew: a curtain of what could be called smart-gas, a vapor whose electrical and tangible properties could be altered upon signal, was stretched across the alcove mouth. The Witches stepped through it, baffled by the sensation as if pushing through an invisible and almost impalpable beaded curtain—but there were more desperate things to attend to, and they were willing to believe it was supernatural, perhaps benevolent, and therefore the crones promised sacrifices to the spirits of this place, the Genius Loci, asking for protection, and used secret names to threaten, bind, and command.
And then the dogs were upon them.
Twenty-four dogs were in a line before an alcove in which thirty Witches were crammed, hiding, if at all, behind suits of armor from the First Dark Ages. This was not the carbon nanotube–reinforced titanium-steel ceramic of Maltese Powered Armor. These were pieces of handmade iron, or steel forged before Bessemer invented his process.
The line of dog things was simply a firing squad. When the fighting erupted around them, and the ceiling guns destroyed those in this dog squad who had dared open fire on Bashan, the order to hold fire rang through the chamber. The Witches cheered, and mocked the dogs in a language they did not speak, and an overly excited Doberman Pinscher ordered the charge.
Bayonets ready, the dogs rushed in at top speed. The prayers to the Genius Loci were seemingly answered, because the purpose of the curtain of smart vapor was to prevent fast-moving objects from hitting the storage tanks. The air around the dogs thickened, and slowed their movements, as countless threads of invisibly fine long-chain macromolecules, diamond threads finer than spider silk and of the same index of refractivity as the air, attracted a suddenly dense substance around them by means of van der Waals forces.
The dogs could press through, of course. The curtain was not armor, after all, merely padding to prevent bumps. But the second line trampled the first when the first slowed for no visible reason.
The dog leading the charge, a beautiful white-furred American Eskimo, smote with its bayonet, but confused by the unseen curtain, it missed the screaming Witch-man and struck the wall of the container unit behind him. A stream of viscous material, which scalded it as with acid, sprayed down its musket barrel and onto its paws, and the smell, to the dog’s sensitive nose, was the smell of death. The Witch clubbed the dog to the floor with his spearshaft, and drove the point into the dog’s belly; the dog screamed in agony and terror, trying to scramble away, its entrails unspooling like grisly red spaghetti on the floor around it, and its paws still smoldering, being eaten by the strange fluid.
The Demonstrators, seeing the magic of the Hags manifested before their eyes, suddenly realized three things. First, the Witches outnumbered the dog things set against them. The other packs were elsewhere, fighting Giants or Chimerae or Hormagaunts—all of whom were creatures from one version of the Witch afterlife or another, lending for the Witches an air of unearthliness to the scene, and this perhaps aided their courage.
Second, no dog dared now to fire its weapon. The curse of the Judge of Ages, a demigod, was clearly in full force here in the buried world of his golden Tomb.
Third, the poleaxes, pikes, and halberds pulled conveniently from the walls had reach on the musket bayonets, and were lighter, and were not butt-heavy, and were in every way better designed as an implement for stabbing a foe beyond arm’s length than was either cutlass or bayonet.
So the twelve Demonstrators roared like men gone mad, and the other Witch-men, whether farmer or huntsman or factory hand, roared with them. Something in the instinctive fear of beast for man seized the line of dog things, or else they realized at the same moment their disadvantage of numbers and weapons.
The dogs broke and fled on all fours before another blow was struck. The Witches, of all races of man, were both the most in love with violence for its own sake, and the least disciplined of fighters. There was no captain to call the Witch-men back into line, and the crones did not know enough military science to give the order. The sight of a fleeing foe in combat makes a man drunk with battle-lust, and only soldiers trained to steadiness of nerve can resist the temptation.
The Demonstrators did not resist the temptation. Then ran each Witch-man whichever way his feet took him, cutting down dogs from behind, falling clumsily on gold floorplates slick with blood and entrails, and running headlong into orderly reinforcements—for the dogs did have captains—or into clouds of choking or soporific gas the automata were spraying. Whereupon the Demonstrators threw down their weapons and ran, but no farther than the nearest wall, this being no battlefield, but a locked room.
The melee with the Witches was both the clumsiest, and most brutal, and, because they were not practiced with their weapons, the least bloody part of the battle.
8. Knight
Humans were not affected by the spore released by Prissy, even though they were affected by the black gas released by the automata. Sir Guiden, now coming down the stairs behind the statue of Michael, greatly daring, hyperventilated, held his breath, and ran forward into the black cloud obscuring the throne.
He had to cross all the way from where Zouave fell, up the dais, past the throne, and down the dais to where the powered armor stood beneath the shadow of Hades. It was not a short sprint.
He opened his burning eyes once or twice, which was a mistake: the black gas contained a lachrymal agent, and tears both filled his eyes, and, under the influenc
e of the chemical, thickened to an opaque glue. Blind, he found the powered armor, and in that hour he blessed and blessed again his drill master who had so often made him field strip and assemble his weapons while blindfolded. He opened the back of the armor, but thrust his head in first to the helmet, clicking the oxygen-helium feed wide open with his chin, so that a blast of fresh, clean air drove the fumes from him. He cried aloud for joy and battle-lust, and his voice was absurd, high and squeaky with helium.
In a moment, he was inside, blind as Samson, and equally as strong. His coif connected with mated jacks lining the helm interior; his implants could give him a fuzzy radar picture of the surroundings. A warning voice in his ear told him that discharges of chemical or energy weapons, sidearms, or rockets were unauthorized inside the chamber during Event Condition Red, and so with a grim smile Sir Guy drew the oversized claymore that hung from his war belt, flourished it in both hands, elbows high, turned on his external amplifiers, and cried out: “DEUS LO VOLT!”
And he waded out into the fray.
Musketballs fired by one or two suicidally brave dog things bounced off his chestplate and helm without even jarring him backward, but the energy pistols of the Blue Men began to crack and drill into his armor. The pistols were aimed so well that the tiny hole begun by one pistol could be found by the next, which continued boring through. He used his sword to cut free a plate of the floor, and held up the reflective, gold surface as a shield to ward off the pistol fire—which now merely concentrated on the leg and knee motors.
Alarms rang in his ears. Sir Guiden wished he could see his helmet readouts.
Automata formed a line against him. He struck right and left with his sword.
9. Knight and Warlock
The knight in powered armor and the Warlock in the coffin were at the fountain.